Why video gaming can be a useful activity for wellbeing

One of the most popular activities an adolescent or young person engages in is video gaming, and quite often it is considered a worry.

Some worries concerned parents might have include:

• Surely more time spent indoors playing video games and less time spent outside with friends can’t be healthy?
• is video gaming is addictive?
• are video games causing us to become violent?

These worries among others may lead to some important questions that need to be answered. How can video gaming be a useful time investment? How is video gaming, in any way, good for our wellbeing?

Modern day video game researchers have suggested that gaming can be a very worthy investment of time. When video gaming started to become a popular pastime among teenagers, the video game research showed how video gaming was a negative activity promoting aggression, anti-social behaviour, violence and other negative outcomes.

However, in recent years, those research studies have been largely discredited for two main reasons: the researchers could not prove what they were finding, and secondly they could not show that video games were the direct cause for these negative outcomes. This led to researchers thinking about how video gaming might actually be good for our wellbeing. What has been discovered so far, is phenomenal.

The Video Gamers Themselves

Some research has suggested that video gamers are spending approximately 10,000 hours of playing video games before they reach the age of 21. How can this possibly be a good thing? Well according to some psychologists, if you spend 10,000 hours of doing any activity, you start to develop expertise at that activity. This means that most video gamers are indeed experts at video gaming. It also means a sense of achievement and using a unique set of learned skills.

But if we look closely at what is happening when a person plays a video game, we can see that the person is constantly reaching short term goals. They are levelling up, beating high scores and defeating ‘bad guys’ all the time. The ability to reach short term goals has been associated with a sense of achievement and increased self-esteem in hundreds of psychological studies.

Video gamers are able to operate in rule based environments. In video games, quite often there are a lot of rules that must be obeyed. In ‘Tetris’ for example, the rules involve placing obscure falling bricks from the top of the screen in order to form a perfect line at the bottom of the screen using control pad buttons. If you do not form a perfect line, the bricks will pile up and you will lose. This is showing quite a high level of skill and mastery that can lead to what has been termed as ‘urgent optimism’. Urgent optimism occurs when video gamers are consistently losing or being beaten at a particular task, they continue to keep playing until they are successful.

Finally, video games are made up of immediate and sophisticated feedback systems. In other words, a video game can tell us how well we are doing in very short spaces of time. We have high scores, the number of bad guys defeated, what world we are on and so on. As we know, when we get feedback from our employers, teachers or colleagues, it can be very rewarding. Especially if that feedback is positive. It can make us smile, feel good, encourage us to keep up the good work, and excel at future tasks.

So that is a short account of how the experience of video gaming can be a useful and positive experience, especially for solo video gamers. But these experiences can be greater when we play video games with others. It encourages co-operation, fosters relationships and also friendly competition.

Video Games and Mental Health

Based on all of this research, it is probably no wonder why video games have been used in mental health settings and is having a remarkable effect on mental illness recovery. For example in Ireland, clinical psychologists have developed a Smartphone game called ‘Pesky gNats’ which uses elements of cognitive behavioural therapy in order to treat depression and anxiety among adolescents. In the United States, Tetris is being used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by combatting flashbacks that often occur after the experience of a traumatic negative event.

Even though the readers of this blog may not be video gamers themselves, I would recommend everybody try out ‘SuperBetter’. SuperBetter is a game-based website and I would encourage everybody to set up an account and give it a shot. SuperBetter involves a gamified approach to increasing personal resilience and promoting post traumatic growth. SuperBetter has over 100,000 users already signed up and has been tested by mental health professionals. It’s also free!

Hopefully this blog has shed some light on the positive benefits of video gaming and how video gaming can be a useful activity for wellbeing promotion. I also hope that video gamers themselves understand how useful their skills in gaming are for both their own wellbeing and for the wellbeing of others.

However a word of caution is advised. Though this blog may promote video gaming as an activity, it is suggested that gaming, like any other activity, is balanced with other activities carried out during the day. Too much of anything, can always be bad!

I will now finish on a quote by Jane McGonigal, a world renowned video game designer and theorist who famously stated: “The opposite of play is not work, it’s depression.” Whether it is a fully agreeable quote or not, it is certainly worth the thought.